It is known that one good way to ascertain the optical polarization properties of an object or sample is to determine its Mueller matrix. By using polarimetry in combination with optical coherence tomography (OCT), the Mueller matrix of a sample can be acquired with OCT resolution. The degree of polarization (DOP) of the back-scattered light measured with OCT remains unity throughout the detection range, indicating that the measured Mueller matrix is non-depolarizing.
However, existing techniques for measuring the Mueller matrix of a sample are relatively time consuming. As a practical matter, the relatively time-consuming nature of these existing techniques effectively limits their use to stable samples, such as bones. These existing techniques are generally not suitable for measuring the Mueller matrix of an unstable sample, such as soft tissue. For an unstable sample such as biological tissue, it would typically be necessary to determine the Mueller matrix during a single scan of the type known in the art as an A scan, and existing systems are not sufficiently fast to do this.